Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

As Arafat lay dying in Paris, bin Laden had again resurrected his own demand to create a great caliphate of terror that would stretch from Asia to southern Spain. It was this claim that the specialists on the sixth floor had used for their own purposes. They had created documents, sourced to Hamas, that Osama bin Laden was set on “dishonouring” the memory of the PLO leader. In the Arab world, such a claim would create unease while, at the same time, would not diminish the impact of statements that Yasser Arafat had robbed the Palestinians of tens of millions of dollars. Setting one enemy of Israel against another was a tactic in which LAP was unrivaled.

One way of doing so had been to exploit the behavior of Libya’s leader, Colonel Mu’ammar Gadhafi. Since he had seized power in 1969, as the twenty-seven-year-old head of a group of young officers, Gadhafi had been a prime target for assassination by Mossad. Having survived several attempts, it drove him to create a team of tall, muscular female bodyguards trained by the former KGB. LAP had focussed on ridiculing him in the Arab world by using fake photographs created in the Mossad psychological warfare photo lab showing Gadhafi in sexual poses with the women. Meanwhile Gadhafi had backed terrorists, including arming the IRA and sponsoring attacks on airports in Vienna and Rome and in a Berlin discotheque, a favorite with U.S. servicemen based in the city. He had been linked to the Lockerbie bombing in 1998. At times his behavior seemed to drift beyond sanity. In 2001, he offered to buy all the bananas grown in the Caribbean to break the “stranglehold” of the World Trade Organization. Sartorially, he rivaled Michael Jackson, his favourite pop star; Gadhafi regularly wore orange robes, gold-braided military garb, and a powder blue jumpsuit.

In 2002, LAP scored another propaganda hit by planting a story Gadhafi had received a hair transplant. Later that year he arrived at an African summit with a container ship loaded with one thousand goat carcasses and distributed them to his fellow delegates. Afterward Jaafar Nimeiri, the former president of Sudan, described him as “a man with a split personality—both of them totally crazy.” LAP was able to use this to great effect. It also focused on Gadhafi’s sexual activities. Having fathered seven children by two wives, he had taken to offering interviews to foreign female journalists if they slept with him. That also became another item for LAP to promote around the world. More recently, in 2003, LAP planted stories that Gadhafi was terminally ill with cancer. But in mid-December 2004, his image as a buffoon who possessed a powerful nuclear arsenal, which he frequently threatened to unleash against Israel, was about to dramatically change.

Mossad’s London Station was situated deep within the Israeli Embassy in the fashionable district of Kensington. Accessed only by swipe cards that were changed regularly, and with a separate communications system from those of the main switchboard, the station was the most protected within a building where security was paramount. Each of the station’s offices had a keypad door and a safe, the combination of which was known only to the office’s occupant. Often a technician from Mossad’s Internal Security Department, Autahat Paylut Medienit (APM), used a hand-operated scanner to check for any bugging devices; none had ever been detected. The half dozen intelligence officers and a support staff had been carefully selected for a key overseas posting in Mossad. The London Station now rivaled in importance that of the service’s Washington base.

The staff worked under the direction of a man they all called Nathan. He had seen service in Asia and Africa before taking over as station chief. His formal duties included liaising with MI5 and MI6, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, and foreign intelligence services based in the capital. He was a familiar face on the capital’s diplomatic cocktail circuit and regularly dined at one of the city’s members-only clubs alongside senior British politicians. It was one of those clubs, the Traveller’s in Pall Mall, that focused Nathan’s attention on that cold winter’s day in December.

As Londoners made their way to another round of Christmas office parties, seven individuals arrived separately at the club, long a favourite meeting place for the senior officers of Britain’s intelligence community. Situated within walking distance of the Ministry of Defense, Foreign Office, Home Office, and Downing Street, it was comfortable and discreet, a place where secrets could be shared over one of the finest steaks in clubland or a reputation gently questioned over a postdinner port in the club’s lounge.

Six pinstripe-suited men and a woman in a black dress made their way past the club porter’s lodge to a back room. It had been booked in the name of William Ehrman, the director general of defence and intelligence at the Foreign Office. A self-service buffet of tea, coffee, soft drinks, and the club’s famed selection of sandwiches had been set up on a side table: the food did not include ham out of deference to the three men already waiting in the room with Ehrman. They were Musa Kusa, the head of Libyan intelligence, Ali Abdalate, the Libyan ambassador to Rome and Mohammed Abul Qasim al-Zwai, the Libyan ambassador to London.

They were introduced by Ehrman to Eliza Manningham-Buller; John Scarlett, head of MI6; David Landeman, head of counterproliferation at the Foreign Office; and two high-ranking officials from Ehrman’s department. He showed them all to opposite sides of a long mahogany table. At precisely twelve thirty on the mantle clock over the gas-fired Adams fireplace, Ehrman spoke.

“Gentlemen, we have come a long way. Let us now move to resolution.”

So began a meeting that would last six hours to negotiate one of the most stunning breakthroughs in international diplomacy in decades. The meeting was to draft and approve every word of the text that would enable Colonel Gadhafi, the man President Reagan once called “the mad dog of the Middle East,” to voluntarily give up Libya’s weapons of mass destruction.

Over the years Gadhafi had created an arsenal that was the most powerful on the continent of Africa. Close to its southern border with Egypt was the Kufra biological and chemical factory. Concealed deep below the desert sands, it was beyond the bunker-buster bombs the United States had given to Israel’s air force. The possibility of launching a successful sabotage attack had also been ruled out after a deep-cover Mossad agent managed to obtain a blueprint of the heavily guarded warren of laboratories where nuclear scientists from the former Soviet Union and former East Germany worked.

Sixty miles south of Tripoli, the country’s capital, was a chemical weapons factory at Rabta that produced mustard gas, a First World War weapon, and more up-to-date nerve agents. These were also manufactured at the Tajura Nuclear Research Center, sited on the Mediterranean coast. In all, there were ten weapons of mass destruction facilities. All were guarded by long-range Scud missiles built with the help of North Korea.

On that December day the meeting in the Traveller’s Club back room was the climax of efforts to end Gadhafi’s thirty-five years of torrid relations with the West and allow Libya to be finally removed from the list of pariah nations.

The road to redemption had begun with the collapse of Soviet communism, which had erased Libya’s hope that the continuous U.S. pressure would end. There had been the failure of a succession of economic programs that had made Gadhafi eager to attract foreign investment. Finally he had come to realize the ever-growing Islamic militancy was a threat of retaliation against his own regime and its long record of supporting terrorism. Even before Saddam had been captured, Libya had begun to ostracize the terrorist groups it had once embraced; at times Gadhafi had increasingly sounded almost like a moderate voice. In April 1999, Libya had agreed to allow two of its intelligence officers to stand trial under Scottish law for the destruction of the Pan Am 103 flight over Lockerbie. After the September 11 attacks, Gadhafi had secretly provided information to the CIA and FBI on al-Qaeda. In 2002, he had supported a Saudi initiative to offer Israel diplomatic recognition (yet to happen), and he had told Arafat not to declare a Palestinian state. All this had been summarized by his son Saif ul-Islam Gadhafi: “If we have the backing of the West and the United States, we will achieve more in five years than we could achieve in another fifty years.” The proof was the presence of his father’s emissaries in the bastion of the English establishment.